by F. G. Cottam
Adam saw the picture in the open magazine on his drowsy path from the stairs through the sitting room to the kitchen and his date with a slice of Marmite toast and a glass of cloudy apple juice. Such was the shock of recognition, he dropped the Meccano construction he had toiled over the previous afternoon and evening and brought down with him for comfort and security. It hit the floor. No damage was done to it by the impact. Meccano was made of tensile steel and his construction robust, tethered by nuts and bolts. The thing he had so painstakingly built remained intact where it lay.
Mrs Mallory looked up at him in man’s clothes from a room he recognised in black and white. Her tooth had snagged and done something kind in the photograph to her mouth. Or, more accurately, it had done something to her smile. She looked amused and human in the photograph. In life, Adam knew she was never really either of these things. He wished with all his heart his dad was home. He progressed through to the kitchen. And through the window he saw that there was a figure standing in the snow. It was not the headless man. It was not the bearded giant who was killed in his dreams so stubbornly. It was not sad, stoical Rodriguez and it was not the flowery poet, Rupert Brooke. Of all people, it was his maths teacher, Mr Cawdor. Mr Cawdor smiled and waved to him through the window, through the white, descending snow crystals. And Adam was very happy and relieved to see him there. Mr Cawdor was an enemy of the lovely school library, which he considered a wasted resource. And on his worst days, he could grump for Scotland. But the picture of Mrs Mallory in the magazine on the sitting-room table had frightened Adam. And Mr Cawdor was a familiar figure from a world he trusted and understood.
Adam went and fetched his boots and pulled them on and opened the kitchen door and walked outside. There was no wind and, though it was early and snowing hard, it felt quite warm. He looked around for Mr Cawdor’s crappy car. He wasn’t supposed to say crappy, but there was no other word for the two-door automotive travesty Mr Cawdor drove. It looked like a Trabant. Mr Cawdor claimed it was a Fiat. Jeremy Clarkson would have taken it to a disused quarry and shot it with a bazooka. But there was no sign of Mr Cawdor’s crappy car. Adam wondered, was he dreaming?
‘You have to come with me, Adam,’ Mr Cawdor said. He spoke very quietly, as though someone might overhear him. But there was no one around to do so. ‘It’s your father, you see. He’s in trouble and he needs your help very urgently. He sent me.’
Adam hesitated. He had noticed Mr Cawdor was not really dressed for the weather. He was wearing the clothes he wore to teach in under a long thin overcoat. And the narrow lenses of his rectangular glasses had steamed up with the condensation from his breath. ‘My dad said I’m never to go anywhere with strangers,’ he said.
Mr Cawdor put his head to one side and smiled. ‘Come, I’m hardly that, laddie,’ he said. ‘Your dad needs you.’
Adam looked back to the house and then at Mr Cawdor again. It was a dilemma, wasn’t it? It was a genuine dilemma. He wasn’t dreaming it. Should he waken Elizabeth? He was supposed to be respectful to teachers. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure I believe you.’
Mr Cawdor nodded. ‘You’ve every right to caution, Adam.’ He put his hand into his overcoat pocket. ‘I’ve no idea why, but your dad said to show you this.’ His hand emerged holding a Red Bull can. The normally bright blue and silver livery was dull in the matt, sunless light. This reference to a private joke between them could only have come from his father. It was a confidential signal and he trusted it. ‘Okay,’ he said. He would help his dad. He would show courage and resourcefulness. He would make his father proud of him. ‘Do I need to bring anything?’
‘No,’ Mr Cawdor said. ‘And we need to leave immediately.’ He pocketed the drink can. He began to labour down the hill through the snow. Adam went after him as he’d been taught to do, in his footsteps.
Margaret Bancroft stared at the ashes of the bonfire they had lit. A whole night had passed and it was snowing but the earth still retained its heat and no snow would settle yet inside the circle of stones in which Adam Hunter had built their fierce wooden inferno. She looked at the ground. She studied it. A superstitious person might read some symbolism, some runic significance, into the pattern of ashes heaped and lying there. But she did not consider herself a superstitious person in the slightest. She smiled to herself and looked at her healed hand in the early light.
It looked the same. Her self-inflicted wound had left no scar. But it was better than before. The strength she had surprised Adam with in hurling that heavy carved obscenity into the flames had not been the only side effect of the healing done by her daughter. There was much more. For one thing, her arthritis had gone. She had never mentioned her arthritis to Elizabeth. What would have been the point? It was a consequence of old age. She had been lucky to live so long. It was a price paid for her general good fortune and, if it was sometimes uncomfortable and painful, then so what? She endured it without complaint, thinking it a minor inconvenience in the scheme of things. She had never mentioned it to Elizabeth. And now it had gone. It would return of course. Nature had been only temporarily reversed. In time she would retain of what her daughter had achieved for her only the deliberate magic of her healed hand. But that morning she had climbed out of bed without pain and stiffness in her ankles and wrists and fingers for what had felt like the first time she could remember.
The magic was very powerful in Elizabeth and she had told her daughter truthfully that she had known this since Elizabeth had been a young child. But she had not told her how she knew. She had spared Elizabeth that. Elizabeth did not remember and that was a blessing. The things she had accomplished when she had not long been walking and talking had frightened and disturbed her mother. She thought it was comparable to one of those cases where an infant stumbles upon a powerful handgun in the home of one of those American families indulging their constitutional right to turn their house into a garrison. And the child starts waving this lethal weapon around and discovers the trigger. Except that it had been much scarier than that, hadn’t it? And the potential for death and tragedy had been far greater.
Elizabeth had been three. Their nearest neighbours were a couple, Gavin and Lucy Jackson. The Jacksons were desperately upwardly mobile, Gavin a grammar school boy with a chip on his shoulder who worked for Martins Bank. His wife, Lucy, ran a children’s clothes shop in the village. The Ladybird logo decorated its picture window in a bright display of colourful woollens. It was a charming shop. But there was nothing charming about Lucy Jackson. She was taciturn in her dealings with Margaret Bancroft to the point of rudeness. Neither of the Jacksons was neighbourly. The Bancrofts made overtures, but these were ignored. Margaret privately suspected that Lucy at least was jealous of her university education and professional status. She heard second-hand remarks about who wore the trousers in her house and these were attributed to the Jacksons. But she ignored them.
What the Bancrofts could not ignore, though, was the Jacksons’ dog. They owned a large German Shepherd bitch called Sheba. Sheba was very territorial. And the Jacksons let Sheba roam rather than exercising the dog properly. She thought her territory extended far and wide. There were complaints from local sheep owners that Sheba worried their flocks. But unless they caught her in the act, they could do nothing. And Sheba was not the sort of dog it was safe to approach, much less hang on to over a mauled sheep carcass until the constable arrived. The only people she did not seem to intimidate were Gavin and Lucy. But though she never seemed to growl at or go for them, nor did she appear inclined to obey their commands.
She barked incessantly. In those days, a cart track led off the road proper to where the Bancrofts and the Jacksons lived, in homes built about a quarter of a mile apart. This track was lined by drystone walls. And Sheba sometimes guarded it. And when she did, it was just the sensible thing if you were on foot and a Bancroft to clamber over the wall and approach the house through the fields.
In those days, Margaret Bancroft drove a Morris Minor. Her job made
a professional necessity of the car. But she suspected that Lucy Jackson was jealous of that, as well. Her husband used their car to commute to the town and the bank. She rode a moped and the sight of her in foul weather, buffeted along in her yellow oilskin and sou’wester astride this puny machine, was a grim one. But if she was jealous of Margaret’s car, Sheba saw it as a goading challenge. Her furious barks would greet the vehicle until Margaret could safely pass the dog and accelerate away from her.
It happened one Sunday afternoon when the family were returning from a bike ride. Elizabeth sat on a saddle screwed to the crossbar of her father’s bike and his arms sheltered her and made her stable. When they rode slowly she held on to the handlebars. When they rode fast she screwed her little fists into her father’s sleeves and held tightly on to him. Her mother rode alongside on her own bike. And they were returning from their picnic on a bright afternoon and Sheba had been lying in wait. She must have been. They had heard no bark to warn them and would have braked and stopped a safe distance away if they had.
Her assault was furious. They were all three spilled into the road. But it was Margaret the dog targeted, tearing her calf with a deep and savage bite before her husband could drive her away with blows from the heavy brass buckle after removing his belt. John Bancroft was obliged to carry his wife the remaining distance home in his arms with their daughter following forlornly behind, their bikes in a tangle, the breeze blowing their spilled picnic detritus behind them all over the track.
Margaret cleaned the wound and gave herself a tetanus jab. She would be better by morning of course. But she would not carry out the healing on herself until after her daughter had gone to bed. Until then she would do what other less fortunate people were obliged to do and endure the pain of the wound and the inconvenience of not being able to walk. Her husband seethed. He was a mild-mannered man but did not trust himself to confront their neighbours until his anger had subsided. Elizabeth seemed unusually subdued. When her father went to retrieve their bikes, she asked could she go with him. He told her it wasn’t safe, with the dog. And she said something that struck Margaret even then as curious. She said, don’t worry about the dog, Daddy. The dog’s been put away. It’s been put away, for ever and ever in a far distant place.
Gavin Jackson hammered on their door at eight o’clock that evening and accused them of stealing his family’s beloved pet and John Bancroft, a patient man pushed beyond what he could endure, floored him with a punch that caught him squarely on the chin. And after that, no member of either family ever spoke to their nearest neighbours again. Over the following days, Margaret noticed a real brightening in the mood and demeanour of her little girl. She skipped and sang to herself. She glowed.
Sheba was eventually found. Six weeks later, a man using a metal detector on the shingle beach at Buckhaven thought he’d struck lucky. But the thing buried four feet down was the badly decomposed carcass of a large dog. The metal identification disc on its collar had triggered the bleep heard through his headphones. Indignant about this time-wasting find, he reported it to the Perthshire police. Margaret heard that they questioned the dog’s owners. She heard this from McCloud, a retired policeman like the son and later landlord of the Black Boar. Her daughter would come in time to know him as an even more accomplished gossip than his father.
She had told her father not to worry about the dog when they went to retrieve their bikes because Elizabeth had put it away. She had put it away cleanly and neatly four feet under a beach thirty miles from where they lived. She had achieved what she had with a thought. Fear had prevented Margaret from confronting her daughter about this feat. She had long acknowledged that. She knew she was a coward. She had been afraid of her daughter’s powers. She had been even more afraid of the uses to which a grown-up Elizabeth would be inclined to put them.
The cancer which killed John Bancroft claimed him very quickly. It was not diagnosed late. Margaret might have been a coward, but she was a good doctor. The diagnosis was rapidly confirmed. But the disease was swift and ruthless. Elizabeth was four. There was no hospice within a practical distance and Margaret could not bear for the husband she had faithfully loved to die alone. He lay in the house, skeletal, his pain subdued by morphine, his life ebbing.
But he did not die. Weeks passed. He was fed through a drip. He was barely conscious, but he stayed alive. It made no sense because a disease as rapacious as the one afflicting him did not pause in its progress.
Margaret looked at her daughter. They were seated by the fire, Elizabeth on the floor, playing with the kitten Margaret had bought her, teasing it gently with a ball of crimson wool. And suddenly she knew.
‘How long are you going to keep Daddy alive?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know, Mummy. If he dies I will miss him and you will cry.’
‘He’ll find peace, dead. His suffering will be over, Lizzie.’
Elizabeth raised her face to her mother. In the firelight, tears scalded her cheeks. ‘It’s only till I work out how to think him well. There’s more of the disease than there is of him now. I don’t know how to do it yet.’
‘Let him die, Lizzie.’
Elizabeth sniffed and smeared her tears with the back of her hand. ‘And bring him back, when the disease is dead, you mean? Is that the best way? I know how to think that, Mummy.’
It was shortly after this conversation that Margaret made the first subtle changes to her own physical appearance.
She stood in her garden and looked at the circle of stones the boy had filled with his industrious pyre. And she remembered the exultant gleam in her four-year-old daughter’s eyes when she had suggested summoning John back from the grave. The truth was she had always loved Elizabeth. And she had always been afraid of her. Elizabeth had grown up good. She had forgotten the bone magic, had seemingly forgotten how to be bad. But it was very powerful in her and Margaret had prayed daily that she would never rediscover it and succumb to the seductive temptation of using it in the malevolent manner for which her own instinct told her it existed.
She felt the warmth of the heat rising from the stone circle and she winced. She had been afflicted by a sudden ache. It had been twenty years. She smiled, marvelling at her daughter’s potency. It had been twenty years, but she did not have to be a doctor, only a woman. Margaret Bancroft knew a period pain when she felt one.
He’d been drowning his sorrows in the lounge bar of the Thistle in the village when the woman had approached his corner table. She had stood and appraised him for a moment and his first thought was that she could not be a policewoman because the expenses budget wouldn’t run to the wardrobe she wore and the salary wouldn’t get there either, whatever her rank. Andrew Cawdor mostly wore Paul Smith himself. Clothes and accessories were his indulgence and he knew them. And because he did, he knew she could not be a social worker either, for the same reason she wasn’t with the Perthshire force. The suit under the black cashmere of her unbuttoned coat was a couture item, he was sure of it. Perhaps she was from the General Medical Council. Maybe she was a barrister. She looked too prosperous even for the higher echelons of the teaching profession. But he was certain her appearance here had something to do with the business over Adam Hunter. He stood. His chair legs scraped in their retreat on the boarded floor.
‘Mr Cawdor?’
‘Yes.’
She was prising off a pair of leather gloves. ‘I’m Dr Lavinia Mallory,’ she said. Her voice had a velvety coarseness. It was very seductive. All of her was. ‘May I join you?’
‘Of course you may.’ They sat, simultaneously. ‘Can I get you something to drink?’
‘In a moment,’ she said. She matched the fingers and thumbs of her gloves and smoothed out their wrinkles on the tabletop with the flat of her palm. ‘Have you any idea why I’m here?’
Her eyes were grey, like crystal shot through with sea fog, and they glittered when she spoke. He found it difficult to meet them. He found it a struggle to look at her. She was the most glamo
rous woman he had ever seen and he felt intimidated and even slightly overwhelmed by her. He did not reply. He shook his head and curled protective fingers around his pint glass.
She reached across the table and stroked the back of his hand with her fingertips. Her touch was soft and warm. ‘I am here because Adam Hunter is in danger,’ she said. ‘I know you feel a duty of care towards your star pupil. His father is away. He is not a bad man, but he is misguided. He believes his son safe in the care of Elizabeth Bancroft. But she is corrupt and intent on corrupting the child. She has done a great deal of damage already. Without swift and decisive intervention, she will succeed in achieving her immoral and degenerate objective.’
‘She’s a witch, is what she is,’ Cawdor said.
Opposite him, he saw Dr Mallory throw back her head and laugh out loud. Her neck was long and white and exquisitely framed by the glossy tresses of her hair.
‘I assume you’re a doctor of psychology.’
‘Psychiatry,’ she said. She took a pack of Gauloises from the breast pocket of her suit and turned it in her hand the way a cardsharp might a wrapped deck. ‘Uncivilised,’ she said.
‘Elizabeth Bancroft?’
‘The smoking ban,’ she said. She smiled at him. ‘You can help the child, which I know has been your unselfish motivation all along. You could play a vital role in saving him. In a sense, you have nothing to lose. Your career is damaged, probably irretrievably. But helping Adam could be more than consolation, Andrew. It could be your salvation.’
‘I would not quarrel with a single word of what you’ve said, Doctor. But I do need to ask how you know so much about the circumstances.’
She seemed to ponder the question. Then she said, ‘In absolute confidence?’